Research ethics and digital platforms: Finding firm ground in shifting worlds

This chapter discusses the ethics of doing research using digital technologies. As three researchers who have spent most of our academic careers researching various forms of physical activity and moving bodies through projects with ‘online’ elements, we provide examples of the ethically complex situations we have had to navigate. We discuss how the types of ethical decisions we have had to address have evolved over time and reflect different eras of Web culture, changing understandings of what counts as data, and expanding approaches to data collection. We explore privacy and particularly the ‘reasonable expectation’ of privacy that underpins so many ethics boards policies around what digital data we can use. Moreover, we address how expectations of privacy are fluid and some of the emerging conversations around the right to be included (including how excluding particular groups to protect their privacy can reinforce marginalization) and the right to be forgotten. The ephemerality of digital content is addressed when we ask readers to consider the ethical implications of giving permanence to data through our research practices. Relationality is the concept we turn to describe how all ethical decisions need to be ‘situated’ within the contexts of our own personal and professional relations including our relationships with the communities and cultures we study, the academic institutions where we do our work, and our own histories with the digital platforms. Finally, we conclude the chapter by zooming out and considering ‘platform politics.’ This future-looking section attends to the current geopolitical moment and is where address what we believe to be the ethical questions on the horizon including the use of AI in qualitative research, and the polarization and politicisation of social media.